Stephen Pollard is Editor of the Jewish Chronicle and has written columns for several publications including The Times and the Daily Mail and maintained a lively Spectator blog. He is also the author of the controversial 2004 biography of David Blunkett, and co-authored A Class Act: The Myth of Britain's Classless Society, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

The Israeli electorate has given Netanyahu a dressing down

So all those pieces commissioned on how Israel’s electorate has swung to the right, Bibi is a political genius, Israel has never been more isolated, blah, blah, blah … Maybe today isn’t the best day to trot out the pre-planned analysis. Hold the usual suspects back until the next time the punditocracy decides to give Israelis a kicking.

Because last night’s elections show that, far from shifting to the right, the Israeli electorate has made clear that the last thing it wants is an unshackled Benjamin Netanyahu. Almost without exception (and I have to include myself in this), the pundits said in advance that Bibi’s decision to link his Likud party with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu was an electoral masterstroke, uniting the right. For all that Likud dominated the current government, it did not win the last election, in terms of seats won. Kadima, the breakaway party founded by Ariel Sharon to push through withdrawal from Gaza, won more seats, although it was Likud which was able to put a coalition together.

Netanyahu was said to be determined to win – for the first time in his career – the most seats, and took the apparently obvious step towards that when he hooked up with Lieberman.

With hindsight, we now know that was one of his biggest mistakes. A combination of factors frightened the horses. First, and probably least, was Lieberman’s indictment. Even in Israeli politics it’s pushing it to win an election with a party led by a man facing expulsion by the courts from politics.

But there were two more important factors. Running a joint candidates list with Yisrael Beiteinu meant, by definition, less space at the bottom of the list for the less starry workhorses of his party to scrape in. So they had less incentive to campaign – and anecdotal evidence from my contacts suggests that in pure doorstep campaigning terms, Likud was appalling.

Worse, Netanyahu actively removed the more moderate MKs – the likes of Dan Meridor and Benny Begin – from the upper end of the Likud list and replaced them with hardline figures.

If the electorate was indeed moving rightward that might have been the sensible thing to do. It proved, however, to be the absolute wrong thing to do, because it fed into a sense that the mainstream of politics was being ignored. A Likud-Beiteinu list was the first sign of this.

This was made exponentially more important by the rise of Naftali Bennett. Don’t forget that settlers comprise only four per cent of the electorate. So although the message of no compromise and no withdrawal has its supporters, there is a limit. And Newton’s law applies: Bennett may have risen from almost nowhere, but that rise produced an equal and opposite reaction (more than equal, in fact).

Yair Lapid is no soggy centrist wet, but he is a mainstream figure – and it is difficult to overstate the advantage he had of having been beamed into so many Israeli homes every Friday night as a TV host before quitting to run for the Knesset. (The best comparison I can suggest is a combination of Jeremy Paxman and Jonathon Ross, with a smidgen of Philip Schofield, with George Clooney’s cool.) It seems pretty clear that, faced with a new look, hardline Likud-Beiteinu and a rising Bennett, voters said no thanks, and switched to Lapid.

Because the mainstream of Israeli politics isn’t the caricature Millwall ‘no one likes and we don’t care’ attitude. It’s a determination not to be murdered by the terror groups and some of the regimes surrounding it that are bent on doing just that.

Anti-Semites might find that determination objectionable, but most people will think it perfectly reasonable.

We can debate how best to make sure Israel and Israelis remain alive – whether a deal with the PA will make that outcome more or less likely, for instance, which is at the heart of much of the security debate – but the wish to remain alive is not an unreasonable, unreasoning starting point for debate.